


Explorations (Or, the reeducation of a Willoughby sweetheart)

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Multi, TSC Prompt 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 05:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4991770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The girl who would turn out to be Charlie Matheson let her eyes inspect every last detail of Heather’s neat little frame, then turned her back to stalk away. All Heather could do was stare after her, heart lodged somewhere in her throat and her entire body screaming danger.  Something else too, but she hadn’t figured that part out yet.  Wouldn’t be able to until circumstance slapped her in the face and shaped her into someone else.  Someone brave enough not to be terrified by Charlie Matheson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Explorations (Or, the reeducation of a Willoughby sweetheart)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for The Orgy Armada’s fanworks challenge The Second Coming; Prompt #4: "The old men were scary but Charlie Matheson was terrifying." This is my fill for the claim Bass/Charlie/Heather/Miles; the companion piece for Connor/Scanlan is Consolations (Or, Never fuck with a Clansman).

The gossip started within days of Rachel Porter arriving home. Wasn’t often they got new folk coming into Willoughby, so any strangers would have been remarkable, but when they turned out to be the long lost family of their hardworking doctor – you’d think the biddies would leave off with their opinions. But it takes Heather less than an hour of visiting with her Grandma to learn everything there is to know about the new arrivals in the house up the street.

By the time they finish weeding the vegetable garden and move to the hardy patch of flowers out front, she was just about ready to wring Grandma’s neck.   She bit her tongue instead – the woman was old and gossip just about her only hobby – offering the odd “hmm” and “ah-hah” as they worked their way through the marigold bed and the Porter family history.

“Her mama Charlotte was the sweetest thing, but that Rachel … fast. Very, very fast. Too good for little old Willoughby, she always was, yet here she is, back with us, and a daughter in tow. Makes you wonder who that girl’s Daddy is - always had a yen for the wild boys, that one. Getting’ older don’t change a woman any, so I expect that she’s just the same now. Whoever this Stu Redman is, he’s gotta be bad news if he’s caught Rachel Porter’s fancy …”

Grandma had doddered off to harangue her petunias, and Heather had just sighed and started deadheading the stubborn old roses that were clinging to life next to the sidewalk.

And that’d been the exact moment Rachel Porter’s daughter stalked past, mouth set in a hard line and long blonde hair twitching around her hips like the tail of an angry cat.   She’d overheard, and Heather still shrivels with the memory. Most people would let it go, just keep walking, but as Willoughby would soon find out, none of the newcomers were anything like most people.

In a town full of motley tabbies, this girl and her family were lions. And Heather was about to find out what it felt like to be prey.

The Porter girl’s bootheels had rung on the sidewalk for a few more angry paces, and then she’d let out a snort and swung around. Her eyes were pure blue flame, burning hot as they catalogued every detail of Heather’s appearance, from the bare toes she’d been scrunching in the dirt to the worn patches on the old dress she’d thrown on for her weekly bout of gardening. Heather can just about see the rage rising off her, and later, she’ll think she must have imagined the way those remarkable eyes had lingered on the sweaty curves of her breasts before rising to roast her in the full ferocity of that glare. (Ahh, the things she had to learn about Mathesons.)

Her voice was one part cold command to two parts feline snarl. “You know, gossip is a dangerous thing. Specially in a town crawling with soldiers. You might wanna remind the old lady of that.” The girl who would turn out to be Charlie Matheson let her eyes inspect every last detail of Heather’s neat little frame, then turned her back to stalk away.

All Heather had been able to do was stare after her, heart lodged somewhere in her throat and her entire body screaming danger. Something else too, but she hadn’t figured that part out yet. Wouldn’t be able to for weeks and months to come, until circumstance slapped her in the face and shaped her into someone else.

Someone brave enough not to be terrified by Charlie Matheson.

*

They weren’t terrorists, her Dad said. They were a resistance. And if the rumours were true and Stu Redman really was the legendary General Matheson – maybe the resistance actually stood a chance.

(Not like Dylan. Her brother hadn’t wanted to go, but the Patriots took him anyway. And he’d never come home.)

Marian helps them make contact and they stand there in the dust outside a tumbledown shack while fierce Charlie Matheson tries not laugh at them. The legendary General isn’t half as polite, but Heather’s mama had grown up in a trailer on the edge of town, and had passed on a lifetime’s training in smiling and letting the insults slide off.

And then the two Mathesons – who move like big cats and seem to have their weapons fused to them like just another body part – decide that maybe they need some townie help after all. They want to steal a train. They need her Dad to set it up, and Heather is the one who gets to drive a wagonful of Willoughby’s most wanted right into the railyard.

Charlie is quiet until then, even if her expressive face shows off every concern she has about the plan. Her head rears back the minute her uncle says Heather’s name; her objections follow seconds later. “Miles! No offence,” Charlie nods in her direction, “but she won’t be able to do it! And when she cracks, we’re fish in a barrel just waiting for them to come and pull us out.   Not like someone’s gonna charge in and rescue us,” she glares, and Miles Matheson actually _winces_.

When he looks up, his eyes are full of sympathy. “Sounds like something I said once,” he says quietly, and Charlie pales, stung. After a moment, she offers a him a half smile of apology, and when they walk away, their shoulders brush with a kinship that Heather suspects is nothing to do with whatever blood relation they are.

It’s Charlie who takes her aside and fires questions at her like the guard at the gate might. Charlie who helps her hide a knife, just in case, and shows her the best places on the body to target. Charlie who looks her over as they set up the wagon, and smirks as she tugs the neckline of the peasant blouse a little lower over Heather’s breasts.

“There,” she says, eyes twinkling with mirth. “Shame to waste ‘em on filth like that … but it’s _ridiculously_ effective. They won’t really be listening to what you say now.”

They laugh together and Charlie pats her on the back, then tucks herself in between Doc Porter and General Matheson in the hidden compartment in the bed of the wagon. All three of their lives are in her hands now, and Heather has never been so scared in her life.

She remembers Charlie’s words, though, and makes sure to smile and laugh and flirt, then climbs carefully into the back on wobbly knees as soon as they are in the clear. Charlie jumps free of the hidden compartment with a grin that sets Heather’s heart to galloping, and moments later drags her knife across a man’s throat with a different type of grin.

She forces herself to watch. This is the Charlie that everyone else sees, and who Heather had been starting to forget.  

“I need to get in and out in seven minutes, between the guard rotations,” she had explained two nights before the raid, poring over the map Heather had drawn for her. “This guy here, and this one, and just in case he can see around that corner, whoever’s in that tower too.”

“How are you going to stop them from seeing?” Heather had asked without thinking, and the entire table is suddenly quiet. Across the table, she can see her father’s sudden distress, and she’s thankful for that moment she gets to prepare before Charlie answers.

“I’m gonna take them out, Heather. Knife straight to the heart, so that it’s quiet.”

It’s suddenly obvious exactly why Miles Matheson had asked her father if he’d ever killed a man. He had. Charlie had. Maybe even good old Doc Porter had.

And within two weeks of throwing in her lot with Charlie Matheson, so too had sweet Heather Matthews. Not neatly, or easily, or without being able to throw up her lunch, but she’d done it.

And Charlie Matheson had rocked her afterwards, shushed her cries and held back her hair as she vomited.

“It gets easier,” she’d promised, and she’d been right.   It’s never quite as easy for her as it seems to be for Charlie or Miles, and it’s a huge relief when Miles helps her escape the battlefield by recommending her to run messages for Blanchard, but she’s cut a few throats in her time. Knows what it is to struggle to keep your humanity when everything around you is conspiring to turn you into a monster.

The Mathesons, people say, have already lost the battle. They like to bed down with the devil, the rumours say, reborn in the skin of the dead dictator, Monroe.

She knows, of course, how Monroe escaped the death sentence levelled by the Patriots, and that he doesn’t, in fact, have horns. He’d helped save the people of Willoughby from being gassed in the town hall, and that’s ally enough for her. He’s polite, too, gentlemanly yet professional, even if she knows that it’s purely a mask.

Because she knows them for the predators they are, Mathesons and Monroe, seen all of them painted with blood one many times to believe anything different. She’s seen other things too, the games they play – she’d wandered away from their camp once, to find Charlie on her hands and knees in the dirt with Monroe’s knife at her throat. Heather had pulled her gun, finger twitching on the trigger at the very moment Charlie started to beg, keening for him to cut her, to make her bleed, to fuck her harder.

She didn’t understand, then, but maybe she’s starting to. She thinks it’s something about the life they live. All the death that leaves you numb.  And the point where fear is such a common, constant friend it becomes an aphrodisiac, leaving you breathless and burning with desire.

Or maybe it’s just that she’s head-over-heels in love with the scariest person she knows.

*

Heather rides in late, barely making it before night closes in on General Monroe’s camp. She stops to gulp down a bowl of stew, mainly so that she won’t fall over while waiting for General Monroe’s snarky answers to whatever orders Blanchard is sending him. She’s standing in the dark outside Monroe’s tent, mopping up the last of the stew with a hunk of bread, when the hubbub of conversation resolves itself into individual voices.

Charlie, she smiles, and doesn’t even try to get her runaway pulse under control. It’s a crush. She’s dealing with it. Even if the object of her desire is shacked up with the two scariest men in Texas, and is probably sleeping with one of them. Doesn’t matter. The old men might be scary, but Charlie Matheson is terrifying.

And doesn’t that just leave her in a desperate state of wet and wanting. Heather rubs her thighs together at the mere thought, and tries not to listen to the conversation drifting out from the tent.

“Seen the orders yet?”

“Nah. Maybe Blanchard’s giving me the night off for once. Doubt it though – Heather will be around soon enough. You better go check the horses or something, kid. Girl can’t concentrate with you in the room.”

Masculine laughter drowns out Charlie’s muttered response, and Heather freezes in shame. They know – and they’re laughing about her, even Miles, who patted her on the back more than once and said she’d done a great job. She – they …

“Maybe she can read Charlie’s mind,” Miles offers, and it’s Monroe who laughs this time. “Doubt it. That pretty, pretty face of hers would be the colour of a tomato if she knew what a dirty girl our Charlie is.”

The puzzle _that_ presents is just starting to dissolve the hurt when Charlie chimes in with a sultry voice that makes Heather squirm even before the words register.

“Like you don’t wanna hold her down and taste every inch of her,” Charlie taunts her lover. “God, she’d be so sweet. I try to focus on the orders, but I just wanna tell her to sit on your cock and let auntie Charlie take care of the rest. Or something like that.”

Heather’s own gasp is lost in the chorus of groans coming from the tent.

“Fuck it, kid. Now I gotta go speak to her father with pictures like that in my head. Hey, Joe, thanks for rounding up those recruits for us, and by the way, my niece wants to lick your daughter’s pussy until she screams for Bass to fuck her. Now who’s gonna take care of this?”

“Gonna have to be Bass, ‘cause the big bad General tells me I’ve got horses to feed. Maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll walk in on you,” Charlie taunts, and swings her way out of the tent and down towards where the horses are picketed.

Heather stays concealed, exactly like Charlie taught her, trying desperately not to think about what might be going on inside the command tent. Once she’s regulated her breathing, once her pussy is no longer on fire – she’ll go in, she promises herself.

She’ll go in, and pretend she can’t feel their eyes on her, didn’t hear their hot words, doesn’t have their depraved fantasies suddenly circulating in her head.

She does it, too. Holds her head up, delivers the orders and waits obediently for a reply. Even manages to hold back her blush when General Monroe, all professional courtesy now, lifts a questioning eyebrow at how quiet she is.

Normally, she’d laugh and smile, she remembers with a jolt. Bring the news from Austin and update them on the battle near San Antonio. Tell General Matheson about her Dad’s latest project, and anything else’s she’s heard from Willoughby.

He’s not to know she’s picturing him reclining on the cot over there, his battered uniform stripped off, and purple-veined cock heavy in his hand. And it can’t be what Charlie meant, not these men, but the image fills her mind anyway, beautiful blond General Monroe with his mouth full, licking and sucking in a lewd tableau of the type she’s only read about in books.

Heather’s breath stutters as her imagination embroiders the tale a step further; Charlie walking in, stripping herself of weapons and her uniform to crawl naked between them, to wrap lean, bare legs around their hips, and drag pouting, upthrust nipples over hungry, biting lips. Begging them to fill her, to exhaust her, to fuck her until she forgets her own name. And after they’ve satisfied her, she’ll glance into the shadows, and open her arms.

And Heather will stumble forward, lust overwhelming her reason.

“Heather? Corporal Matthews?”

“God, yes.”

General Matheson’s head jerks up at her breathy tone and General Monroe just blinks, something knowing flaring in his brilliant blue eyes.

“I hope you didn’t have to wait … too long for us,” he apologises, tongue flicking out to wet finely chiselled lips.

“I wouldn’t just … walk in. Sir.”

He stares at her for a moment longer, and she can see the gears clicking in his mind. It’s easier to think about him than to examine exactly why she used those words, so similar to what Charlie had said earlier. They terrify her, these people. She’s certainly not trying to get caught.

Is she?


End file.
